Gordon Murray

Last Sunday I attended the Microsoft Silverlight assault course held in the Imperial hotel in Cork.

I found the presentations to be excellent. There were 3 speakers; Martha Rotter, Richard Costall and Chris Hay. Each of the speakers spoke for only 20 minutes at a time about each topic.

They were quite strict about the 20 minutes and had a little timer to make sure they didn’t go over. I think this is an excellent way to present. Being a Techie I like these kinds of talks and took plenty of notes but it could be very easy to go on for too long and bore an audience.

I learned plenty about Silverlight. There were some great nuggets of info such as:

• The XAP (Pronounced Zap) files are compressed files. If you rename them to .zip, uncompress and recompress you can compress them further, saving a little time when downloading your app .
• A clients computer doesn’t need ASP.NET to run the Silvernight apps, it uses a much smaller cut down version.
• A Silverlight app embedded in a HTML page is better, it will make less requests to the server than a .aspx page.
• Silverlight supports jpg & png images, supports wma & mp3 audio files and wmv video files.

Unfortunately I had to leave at lunch time to get back home with family visiting for the weekend so I didn’t get to hear the talks after the break. I missed any swag that might have been going too, Bummer.

I’ll be looking out for any sites using Sliverlight.  I’ll also be on the lookout for any more Microsoft courses, in Cork if possible.

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